The U.S. Open is one of the few occasions a year when tennis really gets its due in America. More than 1 million people—including Simone Biles, Aaron Judge, and other top athletes—shelled out for tickets last year, feverish heat be damned. Ticket sales this year are up by 8 percent. The sold-out after-party, featuring the band Odesza, will transform New York’s Louis Armstrong Stadium from tennis court to dance club. All of the pomp around the Open harkens back to tennis’s history as an aristocratic leisure; the first precursor to the Open, in 1881, was held on a grass court in Newport, Rhode Island, at the height of the Gilded Age. Instead of electronica, spectators were treated to a string quartet.
But over the past half century, tennis has been dramatically democratized. The sport has been growing since the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, when hitting a ball outside, 80 feet from anyone else, seemed to be one of the healthiest exercise options available; last year, more than 25 million Americans played. Tennis today unfolds predominantly on public courts. You might even have a middle school up the street where you can play—just disregard the blue pickleball tape across the baseline. All you need is a racket, a ball, and one other person to return your serves. If you don’t know how to hit, Venus Williams, the winner of seven Grand Slams, can teach you a forehand on YouTube.
All of that makes tennis a refreshingly easy sport to pick up. But its real advantage over other sports is what happens when you keep on playing.
Tennis is a full-body workout. It not only builds muscle but also elevates your heart rate. It is notably more aerobically challenging than pickleball, which has, for the past few years, infringed on tennis’s court space and crowded the zeitgeist. To reach the tennis ball before its fateful second bounce requires horsepower, and you’re responsible for covering a lot of ground—more than double the pickleball plot. The tennis net is also, ahem, two inches higher at center court, making it harder to clear. Frequent tennis play improves bone density, which staves off fractures and osteoporosis.
Crucially, tennis is a lifetime sport (two coaches described their clients’ age ranges to me as between 3 and 90), which means its benefits can last through middle age and your elder years if you stick with it. Keeping up with tennis over multiple decades was associated with a reduced risk of heart disease in men in a 2002 study. A Danish study from 2018 found that tennis players lived nearly a decade longer than their sedentary peers—and also longer than swimmers, cyclers, and joggers. No other sport in the analysis was correlated with such a large boost to life expectancy. (Thanks to this study and others, the United States Tennis Association markets tennis as “the world’s healthiest sport.”)
At its essence, tennis is about moving through space correctly, says John Ratey, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School and the author of Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain. Receiving the ball, you gauge its trajectory—speed, spin, height of the bounce—while determining how to most efficiently reach it. Then, while running, racket outstretched, you decide how you’ll return it, with a new angle, speed, and spin. Ideally, the chosen combination results in the ball landing inside the court, and going to where your opponent is not. Also ideally, the racket (as directed by your body) follows your mind’s split-second intention. You even have to factor in the wind and the sun. The sport demands so much complex motor coordination, as well as finesse, that it carries the same cognitive, balance, and coordination benefits as dancing. (You need only watch videos of Roger Federer leaping and gliding across the court to realize how tennis approximates the quickstep.)
Like any sport, of course, tennis can lead to injury; the most common ones involve sprained ankles, a sore back, torn shoulder cartilage, and weakened tendons. But it’s remarkably low-risk. In an Aspen Institute comparison of the 10 most popular high-school team sports, tennis ranked first for safety, with infinitesimal rates of catastrophic injury and concussion. Tennis may even help stave off injury, especially for older players. Paul Wright, the chair of Nuvance Health’s Neuroscience Institute, told me that if you can balance yourself on a tennis court, you’re more likely to successfully negotiate obstacles at home, avoiding falls.
Perhaps most important, tennis is a workout for the brain. Learning new skills—rock climbing, knitting, chess—can buffer against cognitive decline. In one 2023 study, older adults who were assigned to weekly skills classes developed working memory and attention levels typical of people decades their junior. But there’s reason to expect that any tennis player, regardless of their level, can reap cognitive rewards. Racket sports require completing tasks in unusually rapid succession. (Here comes the ball again! And again, at this new angle!) You always have to be on, Wright said. It should be no surprise, then, that prolonged tennis training has been shown to shorten reaction times; among children, it has also been linked with enhanced decision making.
What’s uniquely beneficial about tennis is that it’s both highly complicated and highly aerobic. Any aerobic exercise can benefit the brain by improving mood, which in turn aids memory and cognition. Tennis, with its explosive bursts—sprinting to the ball, stopping, lunging laterally, jogging backwards to the baseline—can yield especially powerful results. James Gladstone, the chief of sports medicine at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine, told me that tennis resembles high-intensity interval training, which has been shown to improve cognitive function and memory in healthy older adults. In youths, it has positive effects on cognitive performance and attention.
If you want to pick up a sport, I submit that tennis wins in straight sets—not only because it boosts health but also because hitting a ball and receiving it is a great time. Fun reduces stress, and the more stress you have, the more your body needs to move to keep your brain running smoothly, Ratey wrote in Spark. Plus, if you enjoy an exercise, you’ll do more of it and gain more health benefits. Several players described to me the addictive pleasure of striking the ball correctly: the popping sound of ground strokes, the satisfying release of driving the ball from the legs rather than the arms.
Other players find that tennis’s learning curve only stokes their interest. Mastering the sport takes years; that might sound intimidating, but to many, it’s motivation. Laurence Barrett, 89, has played tennis for nearly 70 years, dodging his son’s entreaties to play pickleball (for one, he can’t stand the high-pitched thwack of the plastic ball). On the morning that we spoke this spring, he had, by his own accounting, hit a few “damn good volleys.”
For most of my own life, I had swung a racket once a decade, aiming haphazardly and getting by with a rustic version of tennis. But a couple of years ago, I decided I would learn to hit a clean forehand that didn’t sail skyward. I began taking lessons, soaking in key information such as Don’t get too close to the dang ball. On YouTube, Williams taught me to move my shoulders “as a unit” in the forehand, and so when she appeared as a wildcard at the D.C. Open last month, I bought a ticket.
I showed up two days after the 45-year-old Williams had served nine aces and defeated a woman nearly half her age. I watched as her forehand whipsawed the July humidity, her shoulders unlocking velocity and angles that were even more astonishing in person. How many hundreds of thousands of forehands had she hit throughout her lifetime? Watching her, I could imagine playing the duration of mine.
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